Chairman Goodlatte’s Floor Statement on H.R. 2804, the Achieving Less Excess in Regulation and Requiring Transparency Act (ALERRT Act)
Chairman Goodlatte: “Just over six months ago, President Obama announced that he would once again pivot to the economy. The bottom line of his speech: after four-and-a-half years of the Obama Administration, ‘We're not there yet.’
“The President was right. We were not there yet. Nor are we there today. Job creation and economic growth continue to fall short of what is needed to produce a real and durable recovery in our country. The nominal unemployment rate is down, but that is not because enough workers have found jobs. It is because so many unemployed workers have despaired of ever finding new full-time work. They have either left the work force or settled for part-time jobs.
“As long as this situation continues, Congress must stay focused on enacting reforms that will stop the losses, return America to prosperity and return discouraged workers to the dignity of a good, full-time job.
“The legislation we consider today is just that kind of reform. Through its strong, common sense measures, the ALERRT Act will powerfully and comprehensively reform the federal regulatory system, from how regulations are planned, to how they are promulgated, to how they are dealt with in court.
“This is legislation that Congress cannot pass too soon. For while the Obama Administration’s pivot to the economy has faltered, the federal bureaucracy has not waivered an instant in its imposition of new and costly regulation on our economy. The ALERRT Act responds by offering real relief to the real Americans who suffer under the mounting burdens of tyrannical regulation.
“Consider, for example, Rob James, a city councilman from Avon Lake, Ohio, who testified before the Judiciary Committee this term about the impacts of new and excessive regulation on his town, its workers, and its families.
“Avon Lake is a small town facing devastation by ideologically-driven, anti-fossil-fuel power plant regulations. These regulations are expected to destroy jobs in Avon Lake, harm Avon Lake’s families, and make it even harder for Avon Lake to find the resources to provide emergency services, quality schools and help for its neediest citizens – all while doing comparatively little to control mercury emissions that are the stated target of the regulations.
“Title I of the ALERRT Act helps people and towns like Rob James and Avon Lake to know in real-time when devastating regulations are planned, comment in time to help change them, estimate their real costs, and better plan for the results as agencies reach their final decisions.
“Consider, too, Bob Sells, one of my constituents and president of the Virginia-based division of a heavy construction materials producer. His company and its workers were harmed by: EPA cement-kiln emission regulations that were technically unattainable and included provisions vastly changed from what EPA proposed for public comment; other EPA emission regulations that were stricter than needed to protect health, gerrymandered to impose expensive controls on other types of emissions, and which prohibited common-sense uses of cheap and safe fuel that could actually help the environment; and Department of Transportation regulations that, without increasing safety, vastly increased record-keeping for ready-mix concrete drivers, unnecessarily limited their hours, and suppressed their wages.
“Title II of the ALERRT Act helps to protect people like Bob Sells and his workers from regulations that ask job creators to achieve the unachievable, do not help to control their stated regulatory targets, suppress hours and wages for no good reason, and inundate Americans with unnecessary paperwork.
“Title III of the ALERRT Act offers long-needed help to small business people like Carl Harris, the Vice President and General Manager of Carl Harris Co., Inc., in Wichita, Kansas. Mr. Harris is a small home builder. Every day he has to fight and overcome the fact that government regulations now account for 25 percent of the final price of a new, single-family home.
“Mr. Harris participates in small business review panels existing law uses to try to lower the costs of regulations for small businesses. But he has seen firsthand how loopholes in existing law allow federal agencies to ignore small business concerns while “checking the box” of contacting small business. One case is that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Cranes and Derricks Rule, which was effectively negotiated before small business was ever consulted and threatened to impose disproportionate costs on small builders.
“Title III of the ALERRT Act helps small business job creators like Mr. Harris make sure that agencies like OSHA stop treating them like procedural hurdles and afterthoughts, take into real account the difficulties small businesses face, and lower costs on small businesses that must be lowered.
“Finally, consider Allen Puckett III, the fourth generation owner of Columbus Brick Co., a family-owned enterprise that has been making fired-clay bricks in Columbus, Mississippi, since 1890. His company distributes bricks to more than 15 states, has second-, third- and fourth-generation employees, offers a fully-funded profit-sharing retirement plan and a 401(k) matching program, and has a nurse practitioner come on-site twice a month to provide a free clinic to all of its employees.
“But Mr. Puckett’s company may now be shuttered in the face of two waves of ‘sue-and-settle’ brick-making emissions regulations that threaten to put his company and others like it out of business. After time-consuming litigation, the first regulations were thrown out in court, but not before Mr. Puckett’s company had already lost at least $750,000 in compliance costs and the entire industry had lost $100 million. The second, replacement regulations threaten to be twice as expensive – so expensive that Columbus Brick Co. expects to have to downsize by two-thirds or close. The translation for hard-working Americans employed by such businesses is: higher prices for goods, fewer job opportunities, and lower wages.
“Title IV of the ALERRT Act helps people like Allen Puckett find out about ‘sue-and-settle’ rulemaking deals in time, make sure their concerns are heard by agencies and the courts, and have a fighting chance to achieve a just result for themselves, their employees, and the families and communities that depend on them.
“In all of these ways and more, the ALERRT Act brings urgently needed regulatory reform to hard-working-Americans, whether they are small business people struggling to be heard by faceless Washington bureaucracies or citizens of small towns crushed by the impacts of regulations that force plant closings, harm families, and kill the revenues needed to provide vital services.
“I thank Mr. Bachus, Mr. Holding and Mr. Collins for joining with me in offering the individual bills that now come to the floor together as the ALERRT Act, and urge all of my colleagues to vote for this urgently needed legislation.”